MONOGATARI Series: OFF & MONSTER Season

Episode 11

This is one of those episodes that is more about characters than story progression. The entire episode is two conversations, one in the afterlife and one at Hachikuji's shrine. The overall point is to explore a bit more about Shinobu, her dual nature, and how she views Suicide Master.

It's a bit hard to wrap the mind around but Acerola and Shinobu are at once the same person and not. The human Acerola “died” when she became a vampire which threw away her humanity and became an oddity. However, their memories up until that point are identical. So while Acerola has been in heaven and Shinobu on Earth, they both know Suicide Master equally well, and both are sure that she is not the culprit.

As we saw in the last arc, Suicide Master would rather die than eat substandard food. And both the fairy tale heroine and vampire agree that Suicide Master would never eat indiscriminately like in the case Araragi and Gaen are investigating. They both also seem to think that they are at fault for Suicide Master's current state that after tasting their blood, none other would be palatable, but there is a possible flaw in this logic. While Suicide Master is indeed smaller than we have ever seen her before, surely she would have completely disappeared by now after 600 years of repeated deaths from starvation if that were the case.

How much of Shinobu's (and Acerola's) thoughts on the matter come from ego instead of logic which comes from their belief that they are just that damned special. Sure, it doesn't seem likely that Suicide Master has been feeding on school girls, but that doesn't mean she's currently starving to death because of Shinobu/Acerola. It just makes me wonder how many connections made over the course of this episode are real and not imagined.

That said, things seem to point to another vampire in the city trying to pin things on Suicide Master. There's another code to break and we also have the looming deadline of Kagenui's arrival in the city at which point no vampire (other than Shinobu) will be safe.

It all makes for a good setup for the final act of this story, even if it does little to progress it. I'm looking forward to seeing how things turn out—along with just how wrong my attempts to solve this mystery are.

MONOGATARI Series: OFF & MONSTER Season is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.